Building Eggo

Eggo is the dead simple collaborative grocery list app we’ve always wanted to have in our household. It was built over a single rainy weekend (we had a fair few of these in Amsterdam) and allows us to plan our weekly shop during the week.

Why build your own grocery list app?

We’re an Alexa household and for the longest time found it really easy to ask it to put something on the grocery list when we were running out. This made use of a skill published by Todoist to automatically add the item to a shared list. Even though this didn’t have some of the niceities like categorising the items, we were happy enough with the solution to both pay $30 / year for Todoist.

Unfortunately, Amazon killed this feature to encourage people to use their own app’s shopping list which is awful and doesn’t work well with multiple users sharing the same list. We had a go at a few other list & family management apps but they all felt clunky and had too many features / navigations required to get to our shopping list.

A delightful solution

From the moment I sat down to build Eggo, I knew I wanted to keep things as simple as possible and wrote some tenets before a single line of code:

1. The app should be a single list that can be shared by N people
2. No authentication, list switching, inviting, etc
3. Simple design with a focus on minimizing the number of interactions

I believe Eggo delivers really well on these and it’s down to the decisions made when thinking of how we persist, share, & categorise lists.

Persistence

I chose Firebase to keep things simple and avoid having to write, host & maintain the persistence layer myself. This is a huge reason I was able to ship an app in a weekend that works offline, handles sync well between users, etc.

Sharing

Since we don’t have authentication & users, sharing takes form of a simple QR code representing the ID of the list. You can either view the QR code for your list or scan someone else’s QR code. When scanned, all we’re doing is changing our internal list reference and Firebase sync takes care of the rest.

Automatic Categorisation

95% of my interactions with Eggo start & end at the primary input box. This is thanks to Eggo automatically categorising the items into common grocery categories (thanks Deepseek for generating 100s of items per category for my classifier)

Conclusion

It’s easier than ever to build and publish apps that solve a core problem for you. We’ve loved using Eggo for the past year and so do 21 others (without any advertising / promotion) based on the stats in the play console.

If you need a dead simple shopping list app, give Eggo a try!